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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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All reading about all this dysfunction does is make me wonder why anyone participates at all. Where is the Indian Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who sees money on the table, drops out, and changes the world?

But that just takes us right back to the big obvious question. If India has so many great engineers, doctors, scientist, etc, why can't they achieve great things in India? Why do they need to come here with all the externalities they bring with them?

What you are describing is not an education system, it's a system for fleeing the country and/or other Indians. Because for whatever reason, nothing can be achieved in India. So everyone with any sense at all has one goal, get out by any means necessary. The rest will sort itself out later.

But that just takes us right back to the big obvious question. If India has so many great engineers, doctors, scientist, etc, why can't they achieve great things in India? Why do they need to come here with all the externalities they bring with them?

25 years ago we were saying this about China and laughing at their shitty plastic exported toys. It's entirely possible that 30 years from now, your children will be sitting in your chair bitching about our industries being hollowed out by Indian companies.

It is possible though India's issues are kinda different from Japan/China in that it's not like there's been a massive war or communist effort that's rendered them a big laggard to the rest of the world. There's been no reason of that caliber why India cannot compete previously. They've been permeable to outside investment, they're not recovering from being razed to the ground and there are parts of India that are perfectly functional/developed already.

Japan

Losing the war and being occupied by the allies was probably the best thing that could have happened to Japan's economy, as opposed to dragging them down.

The American occupation broke the Japanese military-industrial complex and forced them into exports and free markets, funneled them large sums of capital via Korean war procurement, American market access and technology transfers, and extended Japan the American security umbrella. The Japanese economic miracle wouldn't have been possible without losing the war and getting dragged into a modern economy by force.

India

While they never went full communist like China, there's a good argument that India could be decades ahead of where they are now without Nehru and Gandhi fucking around with poorly implemented socialism. The over-emphasis on heavy industry, licensing and central planning, failing to implement any real land reforms, and essentially being closed off to trade prior to 1991 were practically the completely opposite conditions as to what made the four Asian tigers so successful.

While I agree that India has different issues to East Asia, having a 50 year disadvantage on Japan and a 10 year disadvantage on China in liberalization did them no favors either.

I mean Japan had already had an economic miracle to get to the point of being strong enough to even engage in their expansionary activity. The close relationship with the USA helped put the afterburners on it, but there was clearly a capability to modernize there already.

People forget there was a time Japan had the same reputation for producing junk. Nowadays look what they’re known for. They learned from their experiences overtime. It’s possible China may do the same.

The East Asian racism was always from lower class whites, who were angry at them merely because of labour competition. The smart people have been predicting the ascent of East Asia and the possible surpassing of the West almost since first post-Renaissance contact.

India, on the other hand... the early Western explorers were like "They literally just stand there in the parade and let themselves get trampled by elephants. What the hell lmao"

The East Asian racism was always from lower class whites, who were angry at them merely because of labour competition.

There was and still is resentment toward East Asians among upper class whites, for providing a robust source of competition in knowledge work and the education credentialist system, and/or making more fashionable minority groups like blacks look bad.

The ascendancy of East Asia was a problem with the timeline, not the above ground factual observations people were making of them, Japan developed after WW2. Yeah, they didn’t overtake the US as everyone was prophesying with the “yenification” of the world economy back in the 70’s-90’s. China has also “ascended today,” whether that translates into a “triumph” over the west remains to be seen. Kishore Mahbubani is probably the most eminent scholar to date that makes this case but he’s been heavily assailed too.

The west doesn’t see India as a particular threat except maybe insofar as they have competing economic interests, although why the US aids Pakistan against India isn’t something I know about in great detail, except only to say we see it in our strategic interests.

US aids Pakistan because Pakistan surrendered oversight of CIA activities in the Hindu Kush listening posts entirely in exchange for having its own free hand to do its own dastardly shit, and from there the Pakistanis leveraged their place as 'useful assholes' for many players globally, a role India never managed because India saw itself too important to aid foreigners at all and so was bypassed by major powers. The Pakistanis asked for US help and offered something in return, India always said it could chart its own course while begging for aid whenever shit hit the fan (request for US carriers in 1962 war, request for USSR submarine support against the US carrier group in 1971, requests for SU30 technology transfers, requests for IMF bailouts, requests for waiver for purchasing Russian/Iranian oil, etc etc etc)

Kishores own reputation within the international commentariat is a byproduct of market demand for a non-Chinese articulate ostensibly neutral heavyweight that isn't bogged down by domestic political considerations polluting the discussion: Kishores commentary and analysis is hardly more breathtaking than informed western China observers that seem similarly dispassionate about capability convergence inevitability like basically the entire US Chamber of Commerce circa 1998-2013, or Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Nye if you want to be intellectual about things.

However, Kishores own media ascendancy is also a byproduct of a deliberate internal tension within the Singapore foreign policy establishment where a pro-US advocate is always raised up at the same pace as an anti-US advocate, and the two actually switch positions depending on the needs of the moment. Kishores antithesis is Kausikan Bilahari, who himself enjoys some time on the media circuits when a counter to the China ascendancy is also sought. You can see the same pattern in others, there is also Chan Heng Chee and Tommy Koh, but that gets too deep into the weeds of Singapores arcane adversarial-cooption civil service modality.

Also, and lets be fucking frank here, Kishores pro-China anti-US sentiment comes from what looks like a fairly obvious chip on his shoulder. His first book was 'Can Asians Think', a direct rejoinder to a presumed racial contempt that supposedly existed in the western policy establishment which denigrated asian (specifically southeast Asian (singapore) at time of writing, but later extended to China and the subcontinent) intellectual ability and execution capacity. Thing is, even at that time of writing the US policy establishment and broadly the west as a whole recognized asian capability and its necessity to be actively managed. Kishores voluminious presence on the media circuit is downstream of what looks like obvious status reassertion, and that there is an especially receptive audience because US domestic political considerations make people cast about for an ostensible 'neutral' just happens to direct that gravy train straight to Kishores lap.

Huh. Thanks for the analysis on that one.

Kishore’s analysis seemed too idealistic and off the beaten path to me. I’ve read his books but he seems to constantly pull out the wrong tools and metrics of analysis to bear on the discussion. You could see it also on Samir Saran’s face whenever Kishore got the mike and seemed to be droning on. His “Civilizationalism” doesn’t seem to be an analytically powerful concept to apply in strategic circles. Insofar as he contributes to the influencing the discussion, he’s worth taking seriously.

I’m curious to know what your background is if you don’t mind sharing. You seem pretty knowledgeable about this topic.

Kishore is definitely smart, dont let my conveyed irritation at his playing the pop geopolitics circuit distract from the strength of his simplistic reductive concepts. If anything Kishore is an aberration to the Singaporean institutional resistance to highfalutin grand theory, their operational modality is see the world as it is not as you wish it to be and maintain internal red teaming to avoid blinkers.

My own experience is unimportant. On the internet I could be Kishores disciple or a disgruntled taxi driver or anything in between, what matters is verifiability. Kishores own books give the necessary info and in the professional sphere if you encounter a single Singaporean in any eliteish profession like finance or tech anywhere globally you're two kevin bacons away from knowing someone with deep insider knowledge of the Singaporean civil service operational modalities which really aren't that opaque anyways. That contact could be any one of us. It could be you! It could be me! It could even be - ok its me I know these dudes directly.

Personally I think it's likely that China will continue to produce a lot of junk, even as the top-line quality of their manufactures grows. (Basically, this has already happened.) It's possible to find some of the highest quality goods in the world in Guangzhou and Shanghai. But if I were a random manufacturing company in Europe looking to source parts I would not trust a random Chinese factory. I suppose given time the free market would correct this, but I think China also provides some unique qualities that could allow them to keep making junk for a long time.

No doubt they will, but they’ve definitely improved in some areas. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur in the west it makes economic sense to contact a Chinese outfit and get them to prototype a product you’ve designed. Plenty of people do it at low cost and reliably but you can also fall into traps. Word is that Vietnam is trying to make itself look very attractive to western companies by upholding their intellectual property and patent laws, and is undercutting even China as a lower cost destination for business to flourish. Not saying I’d easily trust them either, but provided you do your vetting, it makes business sense.

“Guanxi” (i.e. “connections”) is a huge concept in China and defines a lot of the activity about the way the manufacturing sector operates. Western companies are somewhat afraid to dip their toe in the water there (not that I blame them) for fear of getting burned by linking up with a bad partner. Last I read though is that’s beginning to change.

“Guanxi” (i.e. “connections”) is a huge concept in China

This is always proffered as a trait of Chinese culture but I'm skeptical. Connections in this respect are a feature of business everywhere, at all times. The societies that have minimized connections are all WEIRD (Haidt).

I think that "Guanxi" satisfies some deep Chinese need for everything to be catalogued and systematized. They like reifying things. It's not just who you know, it's Guanxi. It's not just networking, it's Guanxi. Likewise their penchant for Lists (Four Great Novels, The Three Principles of the People, The One Hundred Years of Humiliation, etc.). And it's fine if you can observe that it's better to win than to lose, but it helps if you can find the relevant quotation from the Art of War from Master Sun.

That’s true. I think what they mean though is that it’s often a substitute mechanism for doing business in places where institutional controls are weak or non-existent. One mistake people often make in doing business in Russia for instance is they grossly underestimate the role that informal patronage networks play in power dynamics. That isn’t just a problem in doing business there in 2026. It was one thing historians of WW2 pointed out in Hitler’s massive miscalculation to invade the Soviet Union:

“All we have to do is kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.”

The exact opposite of that happened and people ran into the arms of “Papa” Stalin, even as he was brutally oppressing them. Look at China throughout the ages as you just did but with a bit of an adjustment. The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that. If you want you could say “merit” and social recognition in a basic sense play a role and sometimes even a strong role, but it’s not like it is in the rest of the world.

The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that.

I find this incredibly difficult to take seriously. Medieval and Renaissance Europe was full of patronage networks, as was Rome (and its client states), and the Sui-Tang period is precisely the point in history where China develops the institution of meritocratic examinations for the civil service. If anything, you would expect the reverse.

You’re talking about the later part of the Tang Dynasty. I don’t know how well read you are on its history. The first thing you encounter when reading about it was its aristocratic beginnings.

It was your family pedigree that was crucial to maintaining high office, and marriages were arranged between powerful clans to maintain influence. That’s practically the textbook definition of a government ran on a patronage system. The closest analog you may have to had in Europe would probably be something like the Habsburg-style, power consolidation.

But anyway, it wasn’t until the 7th century onward that power shifted away from the influence of these families. That was when you saw the Keju system expand and you had educated, talented individuals without aristocratic backgrounds to gain power. (Which is the imperial civil service examinations you’re talking about.)

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The difference is that the Indian government isn’t powerful enough to make the decisions the Chinese government has either made or didn’t need to (because communism effectively reset property rules and forcibly collectivized smallholders).

India can’t modernize until it deals with agricultural subsidies and inefficient farming which essentially leave vast sections of rural India under a form of quasi-feudal quasi-socialist economic relations. Even Modi wasn’t powerful enough to slightly change this, revolts forced him to back down when he tried.

Believe it or not, many talented Indians stay back in India because they want to, not because they're forced to. I know medical peers who are simply better doctors than me on every single front, and they're happy living and working in India. That is the norm. Only a minority of doctors, engineers or programmers try to leave, even considering those who have the resources and credentials to leave.

India is not Somalia. It is perfectly possible to have a decent life there.

But that just takes us right back to the big obvious question. If India has so many great engineers, doctors, scientist, etc, why can't they achieve great things in India? Why do they need to come here with all the externalities they bring with them?

I won't deign to answer this question. It's beneath me.

India is not Somalia. It is perfectly possible to have a decent life there.

Honestly in today's world, as somebody who bailed from a top-tier Western democracy to a 'mid tier' economy, this is a large part of why I find a lot of desperate migration pushes to be silly. If you're capable of getting into the upper-middle class of like 80% of the world's countries you're probably gonna be broadly fine. Urban development has largely plateaued for a decade or two now, especially in the West where the sheer expense of construction and associated red tape means that the nicer parts of the mid-tier countries are on par/better since they can actually develop things (and keep the homeless out). I'm in Malaysia now after leaving Australia, and from what I can see a lot of white collar quality of life outcomes are essentially equal between here and Australia. You might be earning 40% the wages you would in Australia, staying in Malaysia, but large portions of your expenditures (especially housing) are about 30% the price they would be in Australia.

The Malaysian Chinese demographic have historically been prone to emigration since they're filtered hard from University placements inside the country and therefore go overseas to pursue higher education. 20 years ago they were a lot more prone to just staying in the UK/Australia/wherever else they went, but now the perceived gap in quality of life has shrunk immensely. Same for Chinese. And like I have no doubt that the Somalias of the world still exist where every day is suffering and a battle for survival, but also there's a correlation between immigrants from those places and being unlikely to actually contribute to their destination country.

The answer is that Indians are, for all their many positive traits, not a martial people, and have largely given up on exercising any real control of their domestic underclass. Indian elites live in their pristine multimillion dollar apartments in Mumbai skyscrapers while the street outside (literally right outside) is squalid, covered in garbage and has a random cow or three walking around it - and this really is the state of the most expensive neighborhoods there, it’s not an exaggeration as you probably know. What can you do with that? It’s unclear if it can be fixed. No other major civilization has this issue to the same extent.

India's dysfunction is more about having different lines for what they consider an acceptable levels of grime. If you're a junkie or a homeless person and cross into an area that is off-limits you're getting handled a lot more physically by security than you will be in any Western democracy.

elites live in their pristine multimillion dollar apartments in skyscrapers while the street outside (literally right outside) is squalid, covered in garbage

But enough about San Francisco.

And I'll take the cows over the junkies. I know cows shit a lot, but they'll shit less in public walkways than the junkies do. They're animals but they're not animals.

The San Francisco situation is different. Not only because most of America isn’t like it, and because the truly wealthiest areas of San Francisco have it but less so than eg the tenderloin or whatever, but because we know why San Francisco has its permissive attitude towards the homeless and public squalor. It’s not a mystery. It is, in fact, the core conflict at the heart of the existence of this forum itself. If you ask a progressive San Franciscan elite why they let junkies piss and shit on the street they will tell you. If you ask an Indian elite why they will shrug, maybe mumble something about ‘village people’.

SF has shitting junkies but India doesn't?

I doubt the Indian ones are drug addicts or that they're allowed to shit anywhere near rich people. Designated vs non-designated, etc.

It's hard to exaggerate the very worst I've seen in San Francisco. Having personally seen human shit on the ground right outside comically expensive condos is too obvious an observation.

Hmm. I'm not entirely sure because I haven't beent here myself, but I have heard things to the tune of India being a land of extreme contrasts and widespread filth even in rich neighborhoods, or very close to them.

Yeah. Junkies exist but most asian societies are a lot better than current year Western society at atleast moving them out of the nice places. This is facilitated by greater cultural affinity to gated communities and whatnot, but policing is just generally more civic minded

Not a martial people? That term is so poorly defined that I don't know what to with it. It's not like it's that different in Punjab, which is full of Sikhs, who are as martial as it gets.

Nepal? Full of Gurkhas. Similar grime levels.

My schizo theory is that generations of being divided into castes made indians not see themselves as a unified one: "it doesn't matter that those people are shitting on the streets, that in that village they bathe in cow excrement, they are not like me, it doesn't reflect poorly on me that they do. In fact how dare you imply that it does #notallindians".

My understanding is broadly similar. Caste system gives an easy solution to both 'should we help them' and 'why are they like that'. You can easily designate a lower caste an outgroup, their struggles are self-evident proof of their inferiority and it can be treated as natural law of the universe

You need money. I think you don't realise how much money there is floating around in the US. I'm working on a startup in the UK that has a clear use case, a major client, a solid business model, and industrial trials agreed next month. It's almost impossible to get anyone to fund the ~50k pounds we need for dev work, equipment and support over the trial, let alone the 200k we would need for stability and to take on a few high quality engineers for a year without them/us taking big salary cuts.

The government refuses to fund anything that isn't 100% up and running and used elsewhere. Venture capital is thin and risk-averse; it's focused on specific and very over-saturated sectors, and requires your stuff to be proven and to have a customer already buying from you, by which time you don't need venture capital. Foreign venture capital exists but mostly focuses at home and is more reluctant to invest the more local and less footloose your operations are. Regulation certainly doesn't help, but it's not the main issue.

Who is paying for Indian Bill Gates' equipment, workers and office space? Who is paying for his food? Potentially for his wife and kids?

Aren't second-tier European countries the worst case scenario for this kind of range? You're looking at high cost of living and salary expectations. Indian Bill Gates can get things done on a comparative shoestring (and living in a similarly-cheap country you'd be amazed how often the initial seed capital will just come out of a family member's small-medium business)

Yeah, people say the UK and Europe are generally bad for startups however the US showers even shitty companies with so much cash that I'd treat a random UK company that managed to raise £100k from UK investors as being more promising than a US startup that's been handed $2 million for their idea. Seems like an allocation inefficiency for humanity as a whole with a corresponding deadweight loss that can be avoided if the US VCs were funding the UK companies instead of Juicero v2.5 (now with electrolytes!).

Instead of getting Trump to sign meaningless promises on data center investment in the UK when he visited Starmer would have been much better advised to get him to make promises on forcing American VCs to invest in UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term. That would genuinely have been a lot better for the country than yet another mega datacenter when we have some of the highest industrial electricity costs in the world.

The amount of cash shoshing around in the US is obscene, relative to basically anywhere else in the world.

forcing American VCs to invest in UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term

Except you can't force them, and American VCs will expect that any successful startup will move to the USA for reasons (we're the centre of the universe, here is where the money is, you need the Silicon Valley/Wall Street connections, etc.)

Instead of getting Trump to sign meaningless promises on data center investment in the UK when he visited Starmer would have been much better advised to get him to make promises on forcing American VCs to invest in UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term.

American VCs aren't going to do that, because UK startups that aren't looking to enter the US market in the short to medium term are guaranteed not to make money. Although perhaps it wouldn't be worth fighting with Trump over it if they could do it with pocket change like £200K. Still, Trump knows these are losers as much as UK investors and US investors do, so he's not going to do it.

Yeah, there's nothing stopping American VCs from deciding that the funding a UK start-up wants is chickenfeed and they lose nothing by throwing a few hundred grand their way, except the expectations that your start-up wants to make it big and to do that you need to eventually be US-based.

The problem in the UK is actually the opposite. We have startups that have working viable products with actual repeat customers and they still have trouble getting funding a lot of the time, especially Series B onwards (Seed funding is better resourced). These companies are usually already making money, they just need further funding to expand their offering which is unfortunately not available here in the UK for various reasons.

I mean this is just broadly where West Europe, Australia and Canada have landed. You're not getting the cost effective quality of life you would in nicer emerging countries and it's a lot harder to set yourself up for home run money outside the USA

Hasn’t the UK in whole been suffering enormously the last couple of years due to its own self-inflicted policy decisions? It isn’t just a lot of red tape inhibiting new development from taking places but across all sectors there’s a massive national underinvestment in research, infrastructure and basic labor productivity. I’ve heard of the tax system being so punitive over there that it’s choking the fuck out of otherwise ambitious people. I’ve read of cases of doctors getting taxed in excess of 60% for taking on more shifts (there were other qualifying factors as well), but it would kill my motivation too. University graduates are also no longer the golden ticket to success they once were. That’s increasingly having an impact here in the US too.

All of these things are true, but they hit much harder and are more difficult to avoid when there's less money in the system overall.

You said it yourself: the tax system is punitive, and there's massive underinvestment. So either you have to raise taxes to pay for investment, continue to underinvest, borrow to invest, or explain to the pensioners and the disabled that the government is going to significantly reduce the support they receive in order to give the money to posh boys like me so we can become rich(er).

That last has to be followed by looking for your genitalia because the mob has cut them off and nailed them to a tree in Rutland haha.

They could cut the 'import Afghans and house them in hotels secretly with gag orders' budget... Or refrain from giving Mauritius money and land.

There's no shortage of money in the UK, the British government just knowingly allocates it towards bad ends.

import Afghans

Come on, you know it’s not that easy. I have no love for our current government but the Afghans are coming of their own accord.

The options are:

  • Shoot them
  • Force them to turn back or have their boats tipped over
  • Kidnap them and fly them to Rwanda at great expense and hope this starts putting people off.
  • Keep putting them in hotels and try to figure out a way to stop them coming.

The general public won’t stand for 1 and 2, the left and half the right won’t stand for 3, so we get 4.

——

Edit: the Mauritius stuff really is unforgivably stupid. Stopping it certainly won’t save Britain but spending the 10bn it’s going to cost us on 50m small business investment per year for 20 years would certainly be nice. Doesn’t change the fundamentals though. Britain isn’t poor because the government is wasteful, it’s poor because the alternative is letting people freeze/starve/die of illness while we could save them and choose not to, and we aren’t prepared for that.

No, it's not merely the random Afghans that make their own way that I'm talking about but the ones that the government went out of their way to resettle in the UK, ostensibly because some idiot leaked some data. It was thought the Taliban might do recriminations against Afghans that worked with British forces there. Realistically the Taliban have other concerns.

The government launched a covert £6–7 billion resettlement scheme (Operation Rubicon), relocating over 16,000 to 24,000 Afghans to the UK in military accommodation and hotels without public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny.

That's what I'm talking about. I think the UK should have spent those billions on British people, not Afghans.

I'm sorry, then I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about 'asylum seekers' in general and using Afghans as shorthand.

Force them to turn back or have their boats tipped over

Turn backs worked extremely well for Australia. And I really doubt that the public would erupt into anger that these poor defenceless 25 year old men were getting sent back to the hellscape that is...France.

Also, the government did literally import Afghans in secret, in addition to letting them come across in small boats.

The turnbacks worked in Australia because they towed the boats out into international waters, and left them with enough fuel to reach only Papua New Guinea. I guess we could technically do the same with France - and would even be up for trying - but the French have a lot more tools to make their displeasure known.

but the French have a lot more tools to make their displeasure known.

If Britain didn't make their displeasure with France known, why would it go the other way around? If the French are so displeased, they can stop letting these people into France to begin with.

Come on, you know it’s not that easy. I have no love for our current government but the Afghans are coming of their own accord.

They're coming "on their own accord" because they know they will be welcomed by the government.

The general public won’t stand for 1 and 2

If the general public can tolerate how the rape gangs were being handled, surely they can handle either of these two. At the very least it's worth a try.

the left and half the right won’t stand for 3

What's the logic here? Too expensive?

Also what happened to "send them back directly where they came from. Don't ask any questions, don't bother with process, just send them back"? There's no way a plane ticket costs more than these hotels.

What's the logic here? Too expensive?

Violation of their human rights to be sent to a potentially unsafe country. For some any country bad enough to deter people from showing up and making asylum claims is too bad to send potential refugees to. Rwanda is either too bad or too expensive for not being bad enough.

Also what happened to "send them back directly where they came from. Don't ask any questions, don't bother with process, just send them back"? There's no way a plane ticket costs more than these hotels.

The home countries may not want to receive them back, assuming they didn't burn all identifying documents. Which they do.

Violation of their human rights to be sent to a potentially unsafe country.

I don't think this would apply to "half of the right" like he said.

The home countries may not want to receive them back

Afghanistan is willing, from what I understand.

assuming they didn't burn all identifying documents. Which they do.

There's always genetic analysis, I suppose.

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the left and half the right won’t stand for 3

What's the logic here? Too expensive?

Broadly my model is that 95% of the Labour party and 35% of the Tory party don't want restrictions on 'refugees' no matter what, so they're a dead loss. 3 is therefore viable but very difficult to get through Parliament in its current configuration.

The public does want something done, but balks if it's visibly violent or leads to deaths. So 1 and 2 are out.

"send them back directly where they came from. Don't ask any questions, don't bother with process, just send them back"

is difficult practically. There are three questions: how do you get them on the planes, how do you make the planes carry them, and how do you make the destination let the planes land / take them off the planes?

Mostly the relevant countries don't want these people back and / or it would be unpopular to be seen to take them back. So dedicated transports are unlikely to be permitted to land. For weaker countries you could always start landing unapproved somewhere, but that is difficult and expensive and technically an act of war. If you can't do that, you could put them on passenger jets, but that's expensive and you need a minder to supervise them and passengers / airlines are likely to protest or grandstand.

Not saying it's impossible with enough will, but it's not straightforward. By and large it doesn't beat the Rwanda plan.

The public does want something done, but balks if it's visibly violent or leads to deaths. So 1 and 2 are out.

I'd like to see some evidence that this is an organic property of "the public", rather than a media environment imposed top-down. Again it would be a bit odd if their reaction to it would be greater than the reaction to the rape gang scandal.

how do you get them on the planes, how do you make the planes carry them

The same way you do with every deported individual.

and how do you make the destination let the planes land / take them off the planes?

In the case of Afghans, the Taliban is perfectly happy to take their people back, it's the western governments that don't want to do it.

Yeah, and that's the problem I was alluding to. Because these policies failures compound among one another. I can’t imagine immigration is helping this along either, unless you’re relying on them as a permanent underclass to finance your way out of crises. Good luck resolving that problem. There’s even been an exodus of people out here where I am in the US, moving into other states that are less socially and economically hampered by bad policy.

Agree on all counts. My initial post was more responding to @WhiningCoil by explaining a little bit of why sometimes systemic context means that Indian Bill Gates can't drop out of his obviously pointless schooling and start achieving great things. A lot of things have to go right in your country before 'drop out of school, change the world' becomes an option even for the best of us. In a landed aristocracy things are different - you gate your geniuses by accident of birth but those of them who are lucky get the resources to do something useful with their time.

Unless his suggestion is that Indian geniuses should drop out of school and apply immediately for emigration since that is their ultimate goal anyway, but AFAIK visas are gated on credentials not IQ so that doesn't work.

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